goestoshow

Ryan Paulson, who grew up in a fundamentalist pentecostal family, tells the story of his progression from fundamentalist to heathen. This is great stand-up with a few musical interludes (I could have done with more). The songs each have a small sing-along component, and it’s definitely fun to be blaspheming with a whole room of people.

The highlight for me were the messages he received on Myspace after posting a previous stand-up bit he did to it. Also, his description of his first time having sex, complete with details from the Dummy’s-style book he ‘learned’ from prior to finally doing it. The diagrams were hilarious.

This is absolutely the funniest post-modern sub-brechtian crap I have ever seen. I won’t say much about it because I’m not sure what I could say that wouldn’t spoil it, but the play is awesome. One of my favorites of the Fringe so far.

It was also fairly under-attended, so please go. And bring people with you.

For The Love of a Zombie is a mixed-multimedia play about a farm hand who, through the use of organic pesticides, discovers the truth about the farmgirl he believes he loves. Scenes that take place outside the farm house are portrayed on a large projection screen.

This play, overall, really reminds me of old-school CD-ROM games. Particularly Phantasmagoria. This is definitely not a negative for me, though I suspect it would be for some. The video segments are produced quite well (for a shoestring budget) and are integrated pretty much seamlessly into the play itself. Overall, the play works really well and has a lot of great laughs.

Plus, it’s about zombies, and who can complain about that?

It had to happen at some point, didn’t it? I thought I might make it through this season without seeing a stinker, but unfortunately I didn’t come away unscathed.

Though Brent Hirose shows promise as an actor, the play itself seems a broken and jumbled mess of characters who lack realistic motivation, plot turns that often don’t seem possible (even within the fantastic frame set up by the opening monologue) let alone practical, and poor set design that has Brent spending almost more time manipulating his props and doing sound effects for them than acting.

Occasionally a little piece of satire is thrown in to the play that seems either out of place or a part of a more biting play about media mismanagement and law enforcement incompetence. These little bits just serve to distract from the already weakly put together plot.

But like I said, Brent Hirose shows great promise as an actor (which may even have already been realized in other plays he’s been in). Both the opening and closing monologues are really well delivered, and almost manage to pull this play out from mediocrity.

Moving Along becomes Chris Craddock’s catch-phrase in this play as he regales his audience with stories from his life. What makes this play more special than your average stand-up monologue, though, is the set design.

Crammed into the corner of the tiny little Wunderbar BYOV space is what looks like a cross between an electric chair and a dentist’s chair. Mounted on and around the chair are lights of various intensity (some on dimmers) and direction. As Chris performs, he controls which lights are on through a Star Trek captain’s chair-like control panel on the arm.

As he switches from topic to topic, and from persona to persona (think split personalities) the lighting is used to incredible effect to portray him, literally and figuratively, in a different light.

The stories are funny, especially when he starts asking the audience if they’ve “ever felt that way” about something, always met with a perfect stony silence from the audience, and a resigned “oh” from Chris. Sometimes they’re a little sad, but he always keeps it from getting morose by switching the lights and saying something absurd to lighten the mood.

This play tells the story of a couple who’s relationship falls apart because of a case of mistaken identity. One member of the couple is actually a marriage counselor who through a fairly twisted turn of circumstances ends up being selected as the sex counselor for the husband and his rebound girlfriend.

If that sounds complicated and you don’t get what I mean, that’s because it is and it’s hard to explain. This isn’t a negative, though. In premise, it’s very much a modern version of A Midsummer’s Night Dream where the Gods have been replaced by psychologists (which is itself an interesting notion). Trust me that how they get there is not really relevant to how funny it is once they do.

But at the same time, this is another play that’s almost 1.5 hours and I came out of it not really sure why. It had a fair amount of laughs and really fun plot twists, but it might have had too many characters and too much going on. It would have been improved with a bit more focus and more laughs per minute. At times I found my mind wandering as the non-funny parts of the zaniness went on to set up the next funny part.

The main character sums it up when she says “everybody loves a sexy librarian.” This is a hilarious and touching play about a girl who finds out she’s famous for a sex tape her ex boyfriend made of her (in his apartment, where they always had sex with the lights on, and not normal lights but studio lights). Not only that, but her mother is an MP for the Alliance party (this play takes place mostly in 2000).

Anne Wyman gets the mannerisms that would make for a perfect sexy librarian — think Fred from Angel. She mumbles and jabbers and says things both dirty and absolutely normal in a voice of such innocence and naivite that you can’t help but like her and laugh at nearly everything she says.

The B-plots, which tie in to the main plot towards the end, focus on a sex advice columnist who’s seen and done it all, and the main character’s sister who committed suicide at 14 and currently resides in hell. It is this latter b-plot that prevents this play from being perfect, as it seems to not really impact the main plot in any meaningful way. It also pulls the play away from being an unlikely tale to being an impossible one, and to no gain, as it doesn’t tie in until the very last scene.

It kind of feels like this plot is a remnant of an earlier draft where it was more important, but it’s impossible to say. Overall, this is an awesome play and definitely worth seeing.

If ever there was a story that could demonstrate that humor at its core is about bad things happening to people, this is the one. Played in a completely different way, this would easily be one of the most depressing fringe plays I’ve ever seen. Somehow, they manage to pull it away from the ledge (heh) by filling it up with somewhat geeky humor (the whole play is tetris themed, for example, complete with the famous GameBoy tetris song) and a supporting cast of extremely caricatured people.

At the same time, I can’t help but feel uncomfortable about making light of mental illness and the damage that can be inflicted by 9-5 drudgery on those who are mentally ill.

I had slightly higher hopes for this play given it’s written and directed by the team who did The Overnight last year, which was one of my absolute favorites of that year. I didn’t find this one nearly so creative or innovative.

Quite the opposite from The Overnight, where they maximized the use of 2 actors incredibly well, I felt this play really needed a fourth player to improve the interactions between the main three and the occasional fourth. The switching was never quite so obvious as it should have been, and always involved a main character leaving the stage when I wanted to have their take in it as well.

If this show were just a show about the history of burlesque, it would be merely ok. This one woman show strives very hard to make the point that burlesque, at its original core, was not just about titillation and entertainment but also satire, commentary, and exposition of hypocrisy. But the same goes the other way in that it can’t just be those things.

For most of this play I felt like it was struggling to walk that line. Despite a good cold opening where Sharon manages to almost make coveralls sexy, most of the play is heavy on information and light on entertainment. But then the ending came out and it was stunning. I won’t say much about it except that it involves glowing balls, stockings, heavy beat trance music, and the lights dimmed down really low. It was a perfect exemplar of some of the best modern burlesque has to offer (and she points out that there are three burlesque troops in Edmonton). It also immediately rectified the balance of the play as a whole.

It might have been better if the balance had been better throughout the show, but maybe then the ending wouldn’t have been so great. One way or another, I don’t think you can go wrong with this play. You will be informed and you will be entertained.

Chaotica presents the author’s (and solo actress’) life over the last year as if she were playing a giant life-sized Game of Life. Events in the game include things like “party” (which comes with a giant colourful bottle of booze), “have a baby” (with accompanying sound effects), “get a career” (complete with rap about having to succeed), and “become a star” (where she sings a song about self-mutilation).

The real fun of this show, though, is in the clever ways she brings the audience into it. Though she asks people to come up on the stage, she gives them opportunities to escape being the center of attention. But if you’re a very tall, well traveled, and employed man who’s compulsively honest odds are good you’ll be on stage. Take from that what you will.

The play appears to be a kind of catharsis. The author puts the random happenstance of a negative period in her life into the context of a game where an all-knowing narrator deals her life in chance cards. It’s a powerful metaphor humorously delivered (even the worst card somehow manages to be funny).

Though not my favorite so far, it was definitely a solid show.